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Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberd.

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Well, that question, where would we be without books, is of special relevance today,

because I'm going to be talking to my guest about a book that we could

easily have not had.

And it changed everything.

It was subjected to censorship all over the world.

And the author has taken us back to that great fight to get what was known to be, perhaps,

the greatest, most difficult book ever written into people's hands.

The book I'm talking about is James Joyce's Ulysses.

The book we're discussing is the most dangerous book, The Battle for James Joyce's

Ulysses by my guest, Kevin Birmingham.

And you dedicate this book to your father who taught you about free expression.

And you have in this book an extraordinary understanding of the history of censorship, that it

wasn't really at first about dirty words or even about moral looseness, loose morality. Tell me the beginning of the story of censorship

of literature in America. Well, it has deep roots, really. Legally, the roots actually go to England

and to the United Kingdom. And the standards for censorship

...